Wwii Put Navy Base On The Map

That`s the report in a newspaper clipping from March 27, 1943, tucked into one of a dozen folders full of materials about the station in the library of the Glenview Area Historical Society.

Historical sketches of the station list 1942 as the date of its beginning, when construction totaling $12.5 million transformed the Curtiss-Reynolds Airport into the largest primary aviation station in the country. The Navy had acquired the property by condemnation in 1941 for $42,000. It had used the airport since 1937, when the Naval Reserve Aviation Base was commissioned.

Cmdr. G.A.T. Washburn, who had been the first commanding officer and had served there one year, was reassigned to the base in 1942.

It then offered only flight examination training and, the newspaper report stated, ``the outlook for further development at the Glenview naval activity was gloomy. It was generally conceded that the base had no important future in the scheme of things ahead.``

But Washburn had other plans. He knew of ``the advantages offered by the Glenview location and visualized how important a great Midwestern training base could be in the Navy`s war effort,`` the account continued. Within a month after his arrival, the Navy had approved his plans and construction had begun.

During World War II, almost 9,000 cadets received primary flight training at the station, and more than 15,000 Navy and Marine Corps pilots were qualified in carrier landings. Takeoffs and landings were estimated at 2,225,000. In 1944 the facility became the Naval Air Station, Glenview, and the chief of the Naval Primary Training Command moved there.

It continued training pilots during the Korean conflict, though in 1946 its function was switched from primary to reserve training.

The 1950s and `60s brought jets to the station, primarily single-engine fighters. And that development brought complaints from residents who dubbed the reservists ``weekend warriors.`` Their efforts to ban jet training took them in 1957 to Washington, D.C., where--armed with 7,000 signatures on a petition to remove the entire station--they met with Navy admirals, Illinois` senators and the representative from their district. A compromise was worked out that called for the Navy to replace the jet squadrons with antisubmarine squadrons, which use propeller-driven planes.

All jets didn`t leave the station until 1973, when the national Naval Air Reserve Command was moved from Glenview to New Orleans to join with the surface reserve command under the chief of Naval Reserve, which had headquarters there.

Two jets returned in 1984, passenger C-9B aircraft known as ``sky trains,`` which are assigned to the fleet logistics support squadron. No protests met their arrival. The name painted in black block letters on one plane is ``Village of Glenview.``